Ruin: The Saturday of St. Dimitry by Ruin
There were things you didn't say. Rún knew that, for all he was miserable about keeping secrets. There were things you didn't say. It was whining. It was crazy-talk. It was stupid, it was fantastic, it was peculiar...whatever it was, what it wasn't was normal. The way he thought wasn't normal. The way he acted wasn't normal. That was all right, though. That was just...being Lunite. Or Ungstiri, depending on what it was he was being glared at about. Or being an engineer. Or having gotten his schooling in, you know, a school. It didn't matter - it wasn't normal, but it was dismissable. It was dismissable. That was the important thing. Whatever it really'' was, people could see something else that was normal, and that was...okay. Rún had a great belief in protective coloration. At first he'd just thought it was a nightmare. That was normal. And then he'd done a little reading, and decided it was shock. That was normal, too. When it didn't fade, not in the slightest degree, he'd started calling it post-traumatic stress. That was...a little odd, but in these troubled times not so very much so. That was important. It's not a big deal - that was what it said. A pacifist, passive-aggressive oversized skeletal mouse of a man. It said that, too. But he could live with that. It could be worse. Every burst of pulse-fire, gunfire, brought it back - firework-flashes in the brain, distracting and sometimes dangerous. He'd learned, through repetition, how to function sometimes anyway. But to look...to look into the eyes of a man who would kill him... He'd tried, once, to explain it. His best friend had fallen asleep halfway through, which told Rún all he would ever need to know about how much his nightmares mattered to anyone else. It was entirely possible that Rún was just really, really bad at explaining anything to do with himself. All his ability with words was on the technical level; he could draft an entire spaceship in words alone, talk an engineer through repairs, but a nightmare - or flashback, or personal divine punishment or whatever it truly was - was quite out of the question. His mother's brains were sticky and hot and gloppy on the side of his face, weighting down the left side of his jacket, sticking to his shirt. Her dead weight hung in his arms, an inadvertent and unintended corpse-shield as one raised his gun and sighted down it at Rún. And Rún was frozen, too much changed too permanently too quickly to process, all the world narrowed down to pale green eyes that said he was nothing, had never been would never be more and very shortly would be even less. It could not have been more than a second, two seconds, but in those seconds, in those eyes above that barrel Rún knew, forever, the truth of the universe. And then someone behind him had blown those pale green eyes, and the skull they belonged to, into the same mess of gore as his mother. Rún, for his part, had fainted - to wake up some hours later in a corridor full of bodies. He'd taken a gun (two guns? three?) from the bodies of the fallen, and he must have taken his bookbag because he still had his books (though he couldn't remember picking his bag up) and the escape from there had always been a bit of a blur, resurfacing here and there in incoherent nightmares that never faded, never lost their intensity. You lose something when you kill. Brandon had said that, or something near to it. He hadn't liked hearing that Rún had no regret; Rún, for his part, thought that whatever it was he could have lost was probably already long gone. What was left were pale green eyes over a gunbarrel aimed at his head, and the truth of the universe. He'd heard the truth of the universe in Brandon's schizophrenic ramblings, seen it in Lucius' eyes, felt it behind words of a revolutionary poem. And in every burst of pulse-fire, every rifle-retort, it was there and there was no forgetting it. It was the Saturday of St. Dimitry. Rún didn't observe as many of the holy days as he should, perhaps, but a few were important enough to him to program into the Sidhe. On the Saturday of St. Dimitry, one remembered those who had died in battle...which in Rún's small family, had been everyone. It was stretching the intent a little - his mother hadn't been of the Church, and perhaps 'crossfire' wasn't quite 'battle', but it was the only day that seemed right to light a candle for each of them. And a third candle this year, to one side, for Tasya. He felt someone should, and could only hope she wouldn't mind. The candles for his parents were in a drafty place; he had to light them more than once before they stayed lit. Prayers were offered; Rún added their names to the small church's rolls for the service that day, and headed back out. He should have stayed, he knew that, but he didn't have much left in him for ritual anymore. Faith he had, and hung on to with grim dedication, but not ritual. It felt like denying the truth of the universe. Maybe it was 'normal', the robes and incence and the rituals of the mass, but Rún had a limited store of 'normal', too. He left his tithe and walked out into Greenville proper, musing on matters of robe and ritual and whether it was really worth the effort to try shouting at anyone about it. What he needed was to work with his hands. Less philosophy, less theology, more engineering. One shuttle-trip back up to Hancock and he slotted neatly into the most normal niche he had. After a full shift's time of working on the Saviour's Haste - thankfully, spending almost no time musing on the ironies of the name - Rún gave in to the need to sleep. Or at least the need to go to bed. The cabin was pitch-black and almost silent - just the gentle hum of the air recirculators, and the soft purr of Jackie curled up on his chest. In such darkness it didn't really matter if his eyes were open or not, and that felt comfortable and right in a way planetary night never had. Sleeping in the stateroom rather than on the makeshift bunks in the main cabin was new, or new-ish, but if anything made the ship feel more like a home. He sank into the bunk, into the dark, into rest. And then 'normal' took a right turn at Albuquerque and got quite, quite lost. It began with sounds. The soft cloth-and-leather hiss of body armor moving. Then the metallic clicks and rattles of stun guns and pulse pistols as they beat upon a locker door. Rún heard it, knew what it was. "No," he groaned, even as Jackie decided to tuck herself up in a corner where she was less exposed. Rún pulled the covers up - shield more than anything, as there was no light to see by. "No..." The whispers of cloth and rattles of metal resolved into words. How could you just stand there? his mother's voice demanded. How could you just stand there - how could you not come back for me? You dare speak the mother-tongue in my presence? growled his father's voice and he never contented himself with just a snarl. Worthless tuber, you think you can call yourself Ungstiri? ''We''' ''do not run away, it is for you useless hoopin' tube-rats to run away! Rún could hear it, in the ship - the doors rattling in the lockers, a rasp in the recirculator that hadn't been there before. Rún could do nothing, knew he could do nothing. Rising fear and grief and guilt for all of it - all the wrongs and failures and let-downs - could only emerge as I'm sorry, which was not and would never be enough. Jackie fled her perch on his chest with all four paws digging in claws for traction as she jumped clear. Weapons and armor liberated themselves from the nearby lockers and were hurled across the cabin -some of them hitting him, some of them missing him to strike the cabin walls near him. And Rún held on to the sides of his bed, breathing hard, ignoring the tears of fear and grief that always came, and the reflexive I'm sorry that was true even if meaningless. He listened to their accusations, their anger, knew it for truth and didn't fight it. You couldn't fight truth. You couldn't fight flying stun-sticks and rifles and armor, either, but that was less poetic. Rún was just glad his father had never been the beating kind; he just threw things and shouted a lot. "Morning" was an irrelevant word on a ship or in a station, but Rún's ship-program turned on the cabin's lights after eight hours. Although his ears rang from the ghosts' howls, and his body ached where the thrown-things had hit, the cabin was as orderly as it had been when he'd gone to sleep - though Jackie had apparently decided to sleep near his hips. Rún took a few minutes to catch his breath and let his eyes adjust to the light before getting up, hands running through the unruly mass of his short and curling hair. "Dream" was what someone else would tell him, so 'dream' was what he labeled it, glad that long habit gravitated to clothes that hid all kinds of marks and a cut of beard that helped do the same for his face. He'd let his father die unavenged, his mother unavenged and even unburied. A candle and a prayer were nothing in the face of that, but he had to try anyway. He got sorted - clothes hiding the marks of the battering - and headed out of the airlock to do another few shifts of repair work. "Hey, how are you?" called Jantine as he emerged, on his way to one of the Militia ships for patrol. "Oh...normal," Rún replied, grabbing his tool-kit. A shadow flickered across the Haste's hull; Rún knew without looking that no one else would see. He would be safe enough until next year. A slipped wrench, maybe. A loose panel that would be loose no matter how many times he tightened its fastenings. A patch of oil that leaked from an apparently sealed can. But safe enough. Normal. There really was no better word. Category:OtherSpace Stories